Technology is murdering customer service - legally

I'm currently in the phone tree of hell that is BT. BT seem to have determined that customer support is a cost, and they must minimise that cost. Only certain teams can deal with certain things, but you can't ring any of those teams, you must make a computer understand what you want (it won't), and then the computer will put you through to one of those teams.

I'm sorry, put you through to the queue for one of those teams.

So 3 minutes of automated machine, then 15 minutes of holding, and you've got through to a human - result! This person can take all the details of your case and sort it out, surely?

Nope. This is the broadband team. You need bt infinity support team. Let me transfer you over. The first drone puts you on hold, and then rings through to the right team. I'm sorry, rings through to the queue for the right team. You are then on hold, whilst a BT drone is also on hold waiting with you.

15 minutes more holding, then you are finally there, right? Nope, they need to co-ordinate with the order management department - BT infinity support can't change order details, silly!

I had reached my limit with BT on Friday, told them to cancel my scheduled fibre phone line installation (on the basis that they promised instant BB activation - the fibre is installed and lit, they just needed to flick a switch, and that each time I call to find out why it's still not working takes 1+ hrs). My final words to the guy on Friday: "To confirm, you've cancelled all the outstanding order, the engineer install and anything related to me and BT" - "Yes" - "Thank you, good bye".

Having done all that, today's dance with BT is because they "confirmed" over the weekend to remind me of the engineer install booked... 20+ minutes so far on hold...

Customer services here, how may I /seem/ to help you?

your call is not important to us.

If algos are so much better at spotting chatbots that meatsacks perhaps we can expect an arms race of third-party service suppliers who will marshal an army of customer-bots to take on the customer-service-bots on our behalf in a never-ending battle to elicit useful service. This will free me up to get back to developing an AI to relieve me of the chore of watching television .

This will change

As someone who remembers the 70s (and earlier), I too think that technology has murdered customer service. The first time it bugged me was when I ran head first into computer inventory. "Yes, we have one in stock and it is at our other warehouse. We can get it here in less than a week". Uh, ... so you don't have one, but you thought the computer would make a suitable excuse? It doesn't.

That said, I've seen first class customer service in recent years. People are going to start to demand it. My hosting company replies to trouble tickets (with real expertise) within 15 minutes, and if you prefer, they even answer the phone on weekends. I'm sticking with them and they know it. In fact, keeping customers was probably part of their business plan. We're going to see more of this.

Amazon aren't bad

I need to say that 9/10 you can't fault Amazon for this. They do have customer service - humans most of the time - that do try their damnedest to get you off the phone or screen as quickly as possible - but get you off the phone happy.

A good solution for this problem is the dutch SkipTheMenu app. It maintains lists of phone trees for a lot of companies. If you want to call one of these companies, you can first navigate the tree on your screen (without cost of course), after which you call them and your phone automatically presses all the right buttons.

Now that's innovation!

I've tended to find that the quality (is that the right term here?) of customer service tends to be inversely proportional to the size of the company.

I can understand that to some degree. Given the humongous user base that microsoft has, for example, it would be impossible for them to provide support for every conceivable issue and use case.

Maybe some kind of customer service SLA could be in order when you sign up for things.

As a fluent Welsh speaker...

...I do have a major advantage. Many major companies (BT/Scottish Power/Banks/Royal Mail etc) and all Government services have Welsh language call centres. The queues are much shorter and the chances of you being transferred to India are nil. This is very, very handy when even native English speakers find it hard to pronounce or spell your address, let alone someone speaking their 2nd Language.

The support that never was

> the slow but steady death of customer service

In truth, we've never had good customer service. Sure, some owner-run shops may have "the guy" who knows the in's and out's of all the limited range of stuff they sell. But that is the closest you'll ever get - and you're paying high-street premiums for their over-the-counter stuff you buy. Not exactly 21st century, chasing the cheapest price no matter what, do everything online, way of making purchases.

The biggest problem is that so much of our "stuff" is too complex, too cheap to have been designed and tested properly and too mass-produced to have spare parts available, or for every single item to work perfectly (even the first time).

So yes, it is annoying when you have to call an anonymous call-centre. While I'm not trying to defend them, they do have their own problems: such as the utter, mind-boggling, ignorance of most of their callers. People who neither know what they have bought, are aware of its limitations nor sometimes even realise it needs batteries for it to work (confession time: I was, once, firmly convinced that the TV had gone "phut" until another person, who shall remain nameless, confessed to having removed the batteries from the remote control as the ones in her torch had gone flat). It's these sorts of problems, which must account for the majority of a call centre's enquiries that their systems are meant to deal with - not the geek who calls up to know how to change the dynamic dns settings on their router.

Paying for customer service

With several big (house hold name) companies my employer deals with, we've said that we would pay extra to have our own dedicated, customer service person/people. (when you're spending millions, the cost would be a rounding error) The large companies refused, saying we'd have to use the same pool of agents that everyone else uses. Crazy....

I would happily never speak to 'customer service' if companies actually admitted they made mistakes and had protocol to fix it. If I could fill out a box saying 'I have been charged for X when X is included in my plan, please correct my account and refund the charges' and the company actually did it I would be ecstatic.

I tried the 'call sales to get through to customer support' technique with NPower (which naturally means the phone is answered immediately), but they wouldn't put me through to anyone useful. I gave up.

I have also had the experience of going through all the available choices on the menu, and then getting a useless recorded message at the end of it. This was to get Orange to cancel their fucking £2 itemised statements. The secret is to randomly press buttons on their menus to get through to someone.

Get what you pay for....

...we all want everything to be top notch, but don't want to pay for it.

True, no excuse for mega-bucks profit corporation, but some smaller places, that extra £200k may make or break them.

Still helping design contact centres, nothing pisses me off more than the call centre manager insisting on 200 layers of IVR, patronising hold messages and ill-thought out of info such as "see our website" when you are phoning up your broadband provider.

A good interaction should deal with things like balances quickly, but shouldn't take you 45 minutes to get past that.

Phone Barclaycard for a lesson in lousy design....

_You_ may not have an answer on the phone tree...

...but I can guarantee a substantial number of their customers do. As someone with some responsibility in the tech support side of a company with substantially more customers than employees I would say that 95% of our support requests should read "I'm sorry, but I was too lazy to actually read the two warnings on the order form, I also ignored them in the confirmation email you sent me after placing the order and in the email you sent telling me that my order was ready, and I'd now like to complain that it doesn't look like what I expected it to".

Trying to catch these people before they end up wasting your time on the phone is in everyone's best interests. I'd pick a competent self-serve website portal over telephone support anytime.

Frightening

With some products there are helpful people out there that know MORE than the Company's R&D. Unfortunately there are others who are total ignoramuses but posting as if they are expert. You need a certain threshold level of expertise to tell them apart :-(

It doesn't help that the HW appears to be designed from application notes written by the OEM suppliers Intern / Co-op Student and the firmware / drivers/ application / user manual produced by other students and possibly badly ported from ancient C or the User Interface (buttons on a radio with minuscule text LCD, or Camera with random GUI and buttons) designed by a Chimp/Alien/Rat with no human understanding or logic (perhaps a Corvid would do better).

42 languages of user manual that's mostly disclaimers or warning about incorrect battery insertion (they ignore the excellent battery manufacturer's app notes on how to design battery compartments so batteries CAN'T be inserted wrongly!).

You don't even get what you pay for as often the expensive brand is same product as cheap one.

Surely there reaches a point where the diminishing cost of providing support is offset by the amount of business it loses you. Left Pipex a number of years ago after there once excellent support was outsourced after being bought out. Couldn't get them to understand the most basic of issues and they wanted to send a BTengineer (which I would be billed for if no fault found) when the issue was clearly there end.

Also left giffgaff and BT for similar reasons. When staff are only able to deal with issues on a list and your problem falls outside of those it becomes it's own version of room 101. A swift legal threat in one case got me a refund and away from one. The filing of legal papers got me released from the other. If nothing else at least legal teams seem to have a little more sense but it shouldn't have to come to that to get the most basic of service.